dkirschner's Lone Survivor (PC)

[July 18, 2012 10:10:59 AM]

So the last thing I did before saving previously was to use all my pills in an attempt to get ammo or flares because I was out and couldn't kill monsters to proceed. Using pills triggers dialogue scenes with certain NPCs and I thought I might get a hint about how to proceed or get ammo or something useful. I looked for help online and found out the blue pills refill ammo but I used them all to trigger hallucinations. Woops. Well, at least I had enough ammo from the last blue pill to carry on!

So there are things the game doesn't tell you, like what the pills do specifically. The map is hard to read. I don't know how much good food does me, or what exactly it means when he starts saying 'I'm hungry' or 'I need sleep' or 'exhausted.' However, it's interesting being in the dark because it adds to the game's distressing mood. It's not so much that I don't know, but my character doesn't know. He's slogging through, out of ammo, hungry, and doesn't know what to do about it. I think that's what this game does best. It pushes you along but you're going rather blindly, and that's very much an expression of the character's state of mind.

The game does the 'psychological' and 'survival' parts better than the 'horror' part. The 8-bit retro style can only go so far toward immersing the player in a terrifying game world. It's creepy or disconcerting for sure, but you could imagine it with something besides retro visuals. I just have to compare it to something like modern Silent Hill or Dead Space or Amnesia, all of which are much scarier.

Dunno what it's really about until the end, like post-credits play report end. The game's mysterious characters and the nightmares and confused musings of your character made me wonder throughout whether it was a zombie apocalypse, a virus outbreak, a dream, hell, and finally the correct answer, which really doesn't illuminate the meaning of it all. What's the deal with the girl(friend)? What's 'Mother?' Who the hell are all these other characters? Are they people he knew or are they just imaginations? What exactly is wrong with him? Who knows. It's kind of weird thinking about it that I liked this game and I really don't know what was going on. It's fitting for the story somehow. Anyway, not a must-play, but worth it if you do!
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[July 9, 2012 01:49:18 PM]

Good airplane game. It's creepy, nice music and atmosphere. Low-res visual style works well to convey the mood, which is some mix of confusion, survival, horror, and just like in-a-mind-trip. It's a 'psychological survival horror' game. You're in an apartment building, the eponymous lone survivor after a disease outbreak that turns everyone into monsters. You're plagued with hallucinations and you don't know what's real. Are you really dead? Are you a monster too? Is the whole game one big hallucination? Is this reality? It's like a David Lynch movie, bizarre characters, very dark. You pick up items along the way, the most useful so far being a handgun and flares. You also have to eat food, which requires various cooking utensils and gas for your stove. You have to sleep, which saves the game. You can take different color pills which induce various hallucinations with different mysterious characters. I haven't figured out what the red pill does. It seems to be like speed or something but can't tell. You can kill enemies with the gun, blind them with the flare to walk past, or lure them with rancid meat and then hide in a hiding spot as they walk by. Otherwise, they're solid objects and you can't walk past them in the 2-d apartment corridors. You've got a map to help you navigate. Right now I'm stuck. I need just one more flare to be unstuck but I don't know how to get more, or more bullets. There's one monster in my way after I run out of flares, grr. So my task is to figure out how to get more flares or ammo because otherwise I can't go on, and it would be dumb if I reached an impasse.
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dkirschner's Lone Survivor (PC)

Current Status: Finished playing

GameLog started on: Sunday 1 July, 2012

GameLog closed on: Wednesday 18 July, 2012

dkirschner's opinion and rating for this game

Neat 2-D survival horror. Good music and sound, intriguing story, tough though because of limited supplies! -------------- Confusing in a good way, haha.